19/06/2017

40 Countries Are Making Polluters Pay For Carbon Pollution. Guess Who's Not.

Vox - David Roberts

Most people who have given climate change policy any thought agree that it is important to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions.
They are a form of harmful waste; those producing the waste should pay for the harms. (There's plenty of debate over just how central pricing is to a serious climate strategy, but very little debate that it should play some role.)
That policy consensus has been in place for quite a while. It seems the political world is beginning to catch up.
The sustainability think tank Sightline has just updated its map of carbon pricing systems across the world. Things have gotten quite lively. Here's an animated version:
This map shows the steady, inexorable spread of carbon pricing. The size of the bubbles correspond to the amount of carbon covered. New systems are outlined in orange in their first year. (Sightline)
Carbon pricing through 2018
The big recent news is China, of course. In July, its carbon cap-and-trade system — which has been tested in nine provinces for several years — will go national, effectively doubling the world's priced carbon. (That's the giant bubble on the map above.)
At that point, fully a quarter of the world's carbon emissions will be priced at one level or another. A quarter! Action in the past few years has been fast and furious. Sightline's Kristin Eberhard summarizes:
In 2015, Portugal launched a carbon tax, and South Korea implemented a cap-and-trade program. California expanded its cap-and-trade program, initially launched in 2012, to cover 85 percent of it GHG emissions. After abolishing its carbon price in 2014, Australia launched a new "safeguard mechanism"—a modified form of cap-and-trade—in 2016. In addition to its carbon tax, which has been in place since 2008, in 2016, British Columbia put a limit and price on pollution from industrial facilities (especially targeting coal-fired power plants and liquefied natural gas facilities). In 2018, BC will expand its carbon tax to cover fugitive emissions and forest slash-pile burning and raise the tax by $5 per year. The United States-shaped hole in the fight against climate change is increasingly conspicuous. In 2017, Ontario, Canada, launched a cap-and-trade program, and Alberta, Canada, launched a new carbon tax for transportation and heating fuel emissions. Canada's federalist experiment around carbon pricing paid off: four different provinces are running four different programs, and now the federal governmentis ready to implement a national price in 2018. But the federal requirements leave plenty of room for each province to tailor its own solution. Mexico will also launch a national carbon price in 2018. Chile's carbon tax, in the works since 2014, took effect in 2017. South Africa expected to launch a carbon tax in 2017, but delayed the implementation.
And of course, there's China. That's a lot of bubbles, and they're adding up.

Carbon pricing in the US
As Eberhard notes, Canada is leaving the US in the dust, and Mexico is about to do the same. That leaves the US isolated in North America (not to say the world). But California is currently working to extend and expand its system to meet its ambitious new goals.
The states participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) are in the midst of a program review, which could involve boosting its ambition. And Trump's evident disdain for climate change has galvanized a range of states to speak up and vow action. At least five states have bills in play that would implement some form of carbon tax or fee.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe is talking about a carbon cap in Virginia. Hawaii just passed a law committing to the Paris climate targets. Some 34 states now have climate action plans. (More on states rallying in a subsequent post.)
The point is, while Trump and the GOP have taken the US federal government out of the carbon pricing game (not that it was ever in the game), the policy is still very much alive in the US, buzzing around in states and cities, finally getting some varied real-world testing. Even grid operators and utilities are talking about it.

Carbon pricing in the future
The Paris climate agreement — which Trump intends to pull the US out of, but which 194 countries remain committed to — contains (somewhat miraculously, in Article 6) explicit provision for countries to meet their emission targets (NDCs) by cooperating in cross-border carbon markets, through a common cap-and-trade program or carbon tax.
Almost 100 countries have indicated in their NDCs that they are interested in joining up with an international carbon pricing system as a way to meet their targets. If all those countries actually take steps to price carbon — a huge if, obviously! — the map starts to look quite interesting:
(Sightline)

It is early days yet, and carbon prices remain too low even in places where they exist. But if you squint just right, you can see the fuzzy outlines of a truly global response to climate change beginning to come into focus. That's why the Paris process was so important.
One other thing about the map above. It's notable that three of the biggest remaining blank areas are the US, Russia, and the Middle East. Call it the Axis of Unpriced Carbon.
Perhaps, in the 2020 presidential election, the question of whether and how long America intends to remain in that club might finally become a salient political issue.

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18/06/2017

Finkel’s Clean Energy Target Little More Than States’ Business As Usual

RenewEconomy - 

A new analysis from The Australia Institute suggests that the renewable energy scenarios put in the Finkel review's proposed Clean Energy Target will deliver little more, or likely even less, than those proposed by current state-based renewable targets Coalition parties want to kill.
The research by leading energy analyst Dr Hugh Saddler, from the Australia National University, comes in a new quarterly energy report that investigates Australia's electricity mix and emissions performance.
It shows that Australia is already headed for around 37 per cent large-scale renewable energy penetration in 2030 based on the targets of Victoria (40 per cent by 2025) and Queensland (50 per cent by 2030), which is higher than that envisaged by the Finkel Review with its CET, if you exclude household solar.
"To turn a corner, and show the market the direction we're heading in, there needs to be a strong ambition accompanying the CET model recommended by Finkel. Otherwise it will be, in effect business-as-usual, by another name," says Dr Saddler (who RenewEconomy readers will remember from his regulator monthly analyses when at energy consultancy Pitt & Sherry).
The Finkel Review deliberately excluded the impact of the state-based schemes, arguing that neither were actually legislated, and therefore could not be included in its analysis.
Saddler says the really crucial feature of the scheme will be the emissions target it is designed to achieve, a feature almost entirely ignored by both politicians and much political analysis.
This choice of a single, distinctly unambitious emissions reduction target for modelling has been widely and wrongly characterised by many from all sides of the debate as a recommendation of the Review, which it clearly is not," he says.
"That said, the absence of modelling results for a more ambitious emissions reduction target means that the Report does not provide the range of information needed to conduct an informed debate on target setting."
Saddler points to another major omission – the increase Australia's emissions.
"The increase is being driven by gas used to produce Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) at the three export plants near Gladstone, in Queensland. The LNG-driven increase more than offsets reductions in emissions from electricity generation and petroleum combustion.
"These issues are not addressed in the Finkel Review. Neither are major policies such as the renewable energy targets adopted by the state governments of both Victoria and Queensland, planning for both of which is well advanced."
Saddler's analysis also points to how far Australia is off course in its attempts to reach its modest emission reduction targets of 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
This is particularly the case in the electricity sector, where emissions and coal generation has rebounded strongly since the Coalition killed the carbon price in 2014, and sparked a freeze on investment in renewables that has only thawed in the last nine months.

"The urgent need to reduce coal generation, if we are to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, is obvious," Saddler writes.
Saddler's analysis shows that, in the absence of further policy action, Australia's total emissions will increase from the 2015 level to between 571 and 616 Mt by 2030, i.e. back to the 2005 level.
"This highlights just how far Australia currently is from being 'on track' to achieve its 2030 emissions reduction target," he says. "In the hype around the Finkel Review, this sobering reality seems to have been forgotten.
"Furthermore, The Audit shows that aside from land clearing and land use changes, energy combustion emissions are also increasing. The data published in The Audit paints a picture of an electricity sector operating without regard for climate policy."

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Why Climate Change Is Important To The ‘New York Times’ Architecture Critic

New York Times - Patrick Sisson

Michael Kimmelman discusses his series "Changing Climate, Changing Cities"
Sunset in Rotterdam. Roman Boed: Flickr/Creative Commons
New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman has always taken a wide-angle view of just what the building beat can entail.
Just as the impact of a single skyscraper can only be fully explained by exploring its economic significance, environmental footprint, and connections to the wider real estate and regulatory worlds, architecture is woven into broad social and political issues. A building means nothing without its street, its neighborhood, and the city in which it stands.
That systematic storytelling approach served Kimmelman well when he launched "Changing Climate, Changing Cities" earlier this year, an ambitious examination of how environmental change has started to tug at the economic and social fabric holding global cities together. Beyond rising water, this shift threatens to be a "spark in the tinder" with deep repercussions.
In wide-ranging stories on the water crisis and social strains in Mexico City, China's Pearl River Delta, where rapid development is in a head-on crash with a changing climate, and Rotterdam, where the Dutch focus on turning rising seas into a business opportunity, Kimmelman looks beyond places with immediate challenges, such as Miami, to show how climate change is a universal issue with vexing local political challenges.
Curbed spoke with Kimmelman about why an architecture critic offers a unique perspective on a ubiquitous issue, how cities need to become characters in the story of climate change, and why feel-good urbanism isn't the entire answer.
An aerial view of Mexico City. Shutterstock
Why is it important for an architecture critic to write about climate change?
Climate change is the looming problem of our time, and so much of what the challenge of climate change is about is the world we build, or fail to build, in response to the science, as we understand it.
Once the issue is about the built world and our strategies and failures, it seems to me to be a question that falls naturally under the purview of somebody called the architecture critic.
I suppose my definition of architecture has been loose and broad enough to embrace not just buildings, but the neighborhoods and cities they occupy, and by natural extension, the communities and people who interact with those buildings.
It seems to me not just an urgent subject for us and our survival, but also a fascinating lens through which to talk about the ways cities work or don't work. Our understanding of the urban fabric is as this complicated, interwoven, economic, social, physical, and environmental thing.
The water supply to some poorer neighborhoods in Mexico City is erratic, so residents buy water from tanker trucks like this one, called pipas. Climate change, and the water supply issues it is bringing to the metropolis, threaten this fragile system. Photo by Tim Johnson/MCT/MCT via Getty Images
Climate change is a challenge to almost every place on the planet. And it's very instructive and revealing to see the ways in which different cities have not tackled it, pretended to tackle it, tried to tackle it, and been thwarted by it; the fact that cities, for all their inventive and often progressive ideas, are often thwarted by state and federal government.
Each of the cities I focus on is hopefully emblematic of some larger issues that go beyond climate change to tell about how cities work, what opportunities there are to improve them, and what challenges face them.
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How do you make the story of climate change relatable and make people pay attention? You're adding an extra challenge by picking cities that aren't in the United States and that may not be familiar to your readers.
This is the hardest project I've undertaken at the Times, because the city has to be a character. In order to engage people, I think they have to care and relate to the thing you're writing, and a city is often so amorphous and—especially if you haven't been—it can seem so abstract and foreign. [I'm] trying to find ways into these places that give them some character, scenes, and people with whom they can identify.
People see climate change as some ominous-but-vague thing out there that isn't part of their daily life, so you need to relate the ways in which it has an impact now on situations that relate to them. Mexico City was chosen because it wasn't a coastal city.
It's a mile high, it's surrounded by lakes, it's not particularly hot. It's not a place people think of like they think of Miami. But precisely for that reason, it struck me as being a really good place to start. You may not think that this pertains to you, you may not live in Miami or Tampa, but it does.
Rotterdam at night. Tom Roeleveld: Flickr/Creative Commons
The reaction you get from climate deniers or skeptics to a piece like the Mexico City story is that these issues you cover are longstanding problems. You're describing social problems, geographical problems, which have been around for ages. But climate change becomes the spark in the tinder. It takes these fragile and complex situations and exacerbates problems. That's the lesson of a place like Mexico City.

We seem to be stuck in a situation—when it comes to working against climate change—where cities and local government are up against the federal government. How do you keep your optimism? How do you see those forces working together in the right direction as opposed to butting heads all the time?
Even if you're not interested in climate change, the issues that I hope come up in the conversation about Mexico City or Guangzhou, China—like local governance issues, local versus state, or cities versus federal government—pertain to many things, such as public transit. These articles should also ring a bell when it comes to other subjects.
You ask me how I can be optimistic. I would say in many cases, I'm not. One thing I hope is implied, or will come across, is that the kind of feel-good, "mayors are the answers to everything, cities are our future" philosophy, which has dominated a lot of urban discussions, sounds good, but runs up against the reality that cities aren't countries. They do rely on state and national governments, with which they are very often at odds.
[It's important to] be honest about that, and not pretend that mayors can do everything, even though they are on the front lines and are full of good ideas. Implementing those ideas is something entirely different. We need to move beyond that feel-good stage to begin to tackle the larger problem: How do you make good ideas a reality?
The Maeslantkering, a massive gate that controls the flow of water into Rotterdam's port. Each of the two arms are as tall as the Eiffel Tower and twice as heavy. M. Moers: Flickr/Creative Commons
You did a piece on Habitat III [the United Nation's global conference on urbanization and cities] where you talk about seeing all of these forward-thinking, progressive city officials and architects. The ideas are there, but the political will to work together and make them happen is what's missing.
I saw this with the mayor of Mexico City. I mentioned in the article he said that his federal funding had been cut to zero. The present administration in Mexico was opposed to the mayor and wanted to screw him over.
He can say what he wants about pedestrianizing streets and installing bike lanes, and the usual checklist of to-dos, but in the end, those changes are wildly outweighed by the massive highways, suburban sprawl, and corrupt housing projects that eat into all sorts of supposedly protected lands. The mayor ultimately is helpless against those larger forces.
If people are honest about and aware of those conflicts, and organize around the issues that they care about, then perhaps one can create the political will to overcome those conflicts. I think mayors who just say "we're doing the right things" or "we want to do the right things"—it's not enough.
The Pearl River in Guangzhou. The river has flooded throughout its history, but climate change is making annual floods more severe, threatening an area vital to global supply chains and manufacturing. Carlos Jiménez Ruiz: Flickr/Creative Commons
It's a central issue in our country. How can cities and a large majority of Americans somehow guarantee basic services and rights when the federal government is broken or actually hostile to the majority?
I think that begins with an honest conversation about the limitations of local government, and about creating new networks. Some of which I think should lean on those very foundations and private sources which have maybe not been as motivated to implement real change, but have seen themselves more as encouraging governments to say the right things.
And so there has been a kind of atmosphere of, not self-promotion exactly, but somehow that just saying the right things one has done enough. We're at a condition now where clearly that's not going to suffice.

What lessons can people take from these stories to help the situation? What can an everyday citizen do?
That's a very good question. There are local and global answers. Locally, we need to think of cities as organic places, places that change and can change that are shared by other people. The process of making change is an ongoing obligation. It's a social obligation.
We have to accept that as part of being a citizen, and engage on a local level, whether it's fighting for decent neighborhoods, fighting against the dominance of the automobile, or fighting for green spaces and public squares.
Becoming part of the conversation creates healthier cities and citizens, who become more able to organize and more likely to help withstand the challenges that climate change poses. That's one of the lesson that I think one can extract from the Dutch: that a strong citizenry is more capable to deal with what's ahead.
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On a larger level, beyond political organization, we need to have really serious, constructive conversations—which we don't do here because we have so many immediate crises—about the kind of steps that would need to be taken to make long-term, healthy communities.
In New York City, we haven't really had the difficult conversations about where we should and shouldn't live. We haven't [hashed] out the real larger questions about the larger infrastructure investments we need to make. We tend to avoid those conversations. They're hard. Incremental change is a lot easier. The big changes we need to make, they run up against the cycle of political elections. This has always been a problem for us.
But think of the Manhattan grid: It began in 1811. It was finished decades later. It required successive administrations to continue to believe in it and invest in it, and I think it's fair to say without it, New York City never would have become what it is. It was the kind of commitment, made across generations, to build what was at the time an unimaginable thing: a global city. It's not that it can't be done. We've just got out of the habit of thinking that way.
That's why I'm interested in places like Penn Station. It's an emblem of the difficulties we have in making difficult decisions. But they're also opportunities for enormous, game-changing development. We have to convey better to the public, and the public needs to buy into the idea, that these things are difficult but will yield potentially huge benefits.

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David Karoly Says Government Wants To Destroy The Body That Gives It Climate Change Advice

Huffington Post - Anthony Sharwood

There is currently just one climate scientist on the Climate Change Authority. There may soon be none.
David Karoly. He sees dark times ahead, and not just because he's looking through sunglasses.
Does the government take its own climate change advice seriously? Does it even want a body whose role is to give it expert advice?
These are the questions being asked by Professor David Karoly, a climatologist at the University of Melbourne. There's a tiny bit of background to this story so we'll help you along with a short list.
  1. The federal government has a body called the Climate Change Authority.
  2. Founded in 2012, the CCA is the body that advises the government on climate change mitigation initiatives.
  3. In other words, it tells them WHAT TO DO about climate change. For several years now, the CCA has done this job well. And for a while, the government listened.
  4. Of late, the CCA and the government have not been getting along so well. In 2016, it produced a report called the Special Review of Australia's Climate Goals and Policies. The government turned its nose up at that, rejecting many key recommendations.
  5. Resignations followed. Among them was economist John Quiggin, who quit the CCA in March this year. Here's a sample of his disgruntled, almost despairing resignation letter:
    "The government's refusal to accept the advice of its own Authority, despite wide support for that advice from business, environmental groups and the community as a whole, reflects the comprehensive failure of its policies on energy and the environment. These failures can be traced, in large measure, to the fact that the government is beholden to right-wing anti-science activists in its own ranks and in the media. Rather than resist these extremists, the Turnbull government has chosen to treat the vital issues of climate change and energy security as an opportunity for political point scoring and culture war rhetoric."
  6. The Climate Change Authority now faces a new crisis that could effectively strip its credibility to the bone. The CCA could have no climate scientists on it.
  7. Right now, there is just one climate scientist on the Authority. As mentioned, he is the eminent climatologist Professor David Karoly of the University of Melbourne. His five-year term ends on June 30. He fears he will not be replaced by a climate scientist.
  8. Wait. The Climate Change Authority could soon have no climate scientists on it?
What???  Mickrick via Getty Images
  1. HuffPost Australia asked the government to clarify whether Prof. Karoly's position would be filled by a climate scientist -- or indeed by any scientist -- when his term expires.
  2. A spokesman for Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said only that "Government appointments to the CCA will be made consistent with the CCA's legislation".
  3. We were not intimately familiar with said piece of legislation, so we looked it up, and discovered that there's no requirement for a climate scientist to be on the CCA. Which means Frydenberg may choose not to appoint one.
Josh Frydenberg. Bloomberg via Getty Images
  1. One more time. The body which advises the government on what to do about climate change may soon have nobody with expertise in climate science -- the very subject which underpins the body's existence.
  2. For the record, the other current CCA members include businesspeople, a natural resources expert, an energy expert and a CEO -- Shayleen Thompson -- who is a climate change policy expert. But does the body have any real teeth?
  3. Here's what does David Karoly told us about the future direction of the CCA in Episode 4 of Breaking The Ice, HuffPost Australia's podcast series about the people behind the climate science:
    "The policy of the current government is that the climate change authority should be dissolved. And that seems to be what they're trying to do.."
  4. Naturally, we put that statement to the government for comment. Are they indeed trying to dissolve the CCA? They told us:
    "We continue to fund the CCA on a year by year basis."
  5. So that's about the shape of that. People who've been on the Climate Change Authority say the government is hostile to climate science. The government ignores many of the Authority's key recommendations.
Meanwhile the government will neither confirm nor deny anything about its future -- including the crucial issue of whether a climate scientist will be part of the nine member board after June 30.

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17/06/2017

How World Cities Moving Forward On Climate Change Leave The US President Behind

The Conversation - 

A partial map of all the cities which pledge to fight climate change, with or without Donald Trump. Global Convenant of Mayors/Google Earth
When US President Donald Trump announced that his country would be pulling out of the Paris agreement, the immediate reaction across the globe was one of despair, anger and helplessness.
The Paris agreement is widely seen as the last opportunity for the world to unite and limit the increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius. How can this international agreement remain relevant when the world's second-largest polluter chooses to remain outside its ambit and is not willing to be held responsible?
This wasn't the first time that the United States has reneged on a climate deal. George W. Bush's government had refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (1997), which proved to be the death knell for the agreement and international cooperation at large. An entire decade was wasted with countries sparring over who was really responsible for the mess we found ourselves in, until Paris.
But 20 years is a long time, and between Kyoto and Paris, we find ourselves living in a completely different geopolitical and economic global framework.
The good news is that this time around, there might be reasons to not despair. Within the climate diplomacy framework, cities led by powerful mayors are effectively asserting themselves like nation-states and showing themselves willing to act collectively.

City coalition for climate
Speaking at the press conference about the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement, President Trump declared that he was "elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. Within minutes of his speech, the mayor of Pittsburgh issued a statement reaffirming the city's commitment to the Paris agreement.
He issued an executive order committing his city to the accord by continuing efforts to end the use of landfills, reduce energy consumption by half and develop a fossil fuel-free fleet of city vehicles.

Mayor Bill Peduto was not alone. All in all, 175 mayors (and counting) of the biggest cities across the country, cutting across party lines and representing 51 million Americans, reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris agreement.
On social media, #wearestillin quickly became viral while US mayors pledged their commitment to climate change on an eponymous website listing all supportive cities.
Since Trump's decision to pull out, US states have jumped in. On June 6, Hawaii enacted legislation in support of its Paris commitments. The same day, California independently signed an accord with Germany, with the aim of empowering local communities to combat climate change.
It's not just US cities that support the Paris Agreement. Carlos Jasso/Reuters
Mayors from around the world reacted, pledging their support for the Paris agreement, often adorning their cities' monuments with green lights.

Powerful, independent cities
This isn't the first time that cities have found themselves at the centre stage of international politics. In fact, historically, most global cities have preceded their respective nation-states by over 5,000 years. But by the late 19th century, when the concept of the Westphalian sovereign nation-state developed in modern international relations, and countries became the main actors on the diplomatic stage, the political clout of cities diminished.
Over the last decade, this has changed significantly. For starters, some cities have grown so big that by virtue of their economic might, they're now able to assert themselves independently. New York's GDP (US$1.45 trillion) is larger than that of Spain (US$1.1 trillion) or South Korea (US$1.38 trillion).
São Paulo state in Brazil is wealthier than Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia combined, and Guangdong in China is richer than Russia or Mexico.
Most big cities in the world have also been able to organise themselves under a common international forum, which only further enhances their bargaining power. Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) or the Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) are a few such examples.
These hybrid and often complex networks have been particularly successful in fostering innovative modes of cooperation between the private sector and cities.
The private insurance industry is working with several cities across the world to identify and quantify risks as well as design mitigation strategies and post-disaster financing instruments. It's a win-win situation for both parties as the insurance industry helps develop cities' climate resilience and, in return, gains access to new markets.

City diplomacy
Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is a strong proponent of this form of city diplomacy. He had once cheekily remarked:
We're the level of government closest to the majority of the world's people. We're directly responsible for their well-being and their futures. So while nations talk, but too often drag their heels, cities act.
True to his word, within a few hours of President Trump's press conference, Bloomberg had managed to organise a coalition through the Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), which he chairs.
On June 2 2017, addressing a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace, Bloomberg assured the international community that the US will meet its Paris commitment, and through a partnership among cities, states, and businesses, will seek to remain part of the Paris agreement.
He went a step further and pledged US$15 million, the amount that the Bonn-based secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stands to lose as a result of Washington's decision to pull out of the deal.
Accepting Bloomberg's proposal, Christina Figueres of the UNFCCC has even promised to evolve a method for cities to be able to independently declare their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), a responsibility earlier reserved only for countries in the Paris agreement.
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City leaders have also been active members of the 2016-founded Global covenant of mayors for climate and energy, an international alliance of mayors grouping 7,450 cities across the world dedicated to fighting climate change.
President Trump's decision to pull out of the deal seems to have inspired action not just in American cities but also in the developing world.

The cost of climate change
Last week, India announced that it does not plan to build any new coal plants after 2022. It has also committed to generating 57% of its power through renewable sources by 2027, far exceeding its earlier target and three years before schedule.
Aided by a favourable market and falling technology costs, countries such as India and China are keen to assume global leadership.
Indian mayors are also particularly conscious of the financial cost of climate change. The 2015 floods that hit the southern state of Tamil Nadu and particularly the city of Chennai, caused a US$3 billion loss to the Indian economy. Chennai is now seeking to learn resilience strategies from other Indian cities that have faced similar disasters and adapted successfully.
An aerial view shows a flooded residential colony in Chennai on December 6 2015. Anindito Mukherj/Reuters
One of them is Surat, in Gujarat, on the west coast of India. The industrial, fast-growing town has been severely affected by climate change. In the last decade, Surat has experienced over 23 floods as well as an outbreak of plague in 1994.
But the town has made great strides towards resilience. From building early warning response systems, mapping communities vulnerable to flooding, setting up a system of evacuation shelters, securing the electricity grid, preventing vector-borne diseases and groundwater management programs, Surat has been able to drastically reduce the effects of climate change-induced disasters.
Globally, since 2000, climate change disasters are estimated to have cost a whopping US$2.5 trillion. The case for clean energy, resilience and sustainability is increasingly an economic one rather than purely environmental.

Climate is cities' responsibility
Cities have an added incentive and responsibility to act before it's too late. Almost all of the world's cities are dealing with one or more of the harmful effects of climate change. After all, 90% of the world's urban areas are in proximity to coastal land, which puts most cities at risk of flooding due to rising sea levels. Cities also consume ⅔ of the world's energy and are responsible for over 70% of global CO² emissions.
It is critical that cities have plans in place to deal with climate change and its effects, develop resilient infrastructure and have contingency plans for disaster recovery.
Former US president Barack Obama had committed to reducing US greenhouse gas emissions 26% to 28% by 2025, from their 2005 levels.
If the enthusiasm of the mayors over the last few weeks is anything to go by, President Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris agreement only seems to have reinvigorated efforts, strengthened resolve and motivated local leadership to redouble efforts to tackle climate change. Some US mayors are even confident of bettering Obama's commitment.
If cities, states, businesses, and civil society are able to work together and tap into networks of other cities while maintaining the right kind of momentum, Trump pulling the US out of the Paris deal might just turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

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New Research May Resolve A Climate ‘Conundrum’ Across The History Of Human Civilization

The Guardian - 

The new study also confirms the planet is warming 20 times faster than Earth's fastest natural climate change
Stalagmites and stalactites in the caves of Diros in Greece. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
Earth's last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago. The warmer and more stable climate that followed allowed for the development of agriculture and the rise of human civilization. This important period encompassing the past 12,000 years is referred to as the Holocene geological epoch. It also created a "conundrum" for climate scientists, because global temperatures simulated by climate models didn't match reconstructions from proxy data.
To be specific, the overall temperature change during the Holocene matched pretty well in reconstructions and models, but the pattern didn't. The best proxy reconstruction from a 2013 paper led by Shaun Marcott estimated more warming than models from 12,000 to 7,000 years ago. Then over the past 7,000 years, Marcott's reconstruction estimated about 0.5°C cooling while model simulations showed the planet warming by about the same amount.
A new paper led by Jonathan Baker may help to resolve that discrepancy. The scientists examined stalagmites from a cave in the southern Ural Mountains of Russia. The ratio of oxygen isotopes in the stalagmites can be used to estimate past winter temperatures. The Marcott study had one known shortcoming – the proxy temperature data they used mostly represented the summer season. And as Baker explained, changes in the Earth's orbital cycles have caused cooling in the northern hemisphere summer and winter warming during the Holocene:
Because our orbit is elliptical, we're not always the same distance from the sun. About 10,000 years ago, Earth was closest to the sun during summer and farthest during winter. Today it is the opposite. Based on this variable alone, we would expect winter warming and summer cooling in the northern hemisphere (and vice versa in the southern hemisphere) over the last 10,000 years.
During the period from 15,000 to 7,000 years ago, temperatures were rising because large ice sheets were disappearing. That was especially true in the summer because back then, the Earth was closest to the sun during that season.
So the Marcott temperature reconstruction, which was predominantly based on summer temperature proxies, estimated a lot of warming from 15,000 to 7,000 years ago (more than in model simulations), then a small cooling thereafter, while models simulate a slight warming over the past 7,000 years due to a slow rise in greenhouse gases.
The stalagmite data in the Baker study show that winter temperatures behaved differently and can reconcile the discrepancies between the Marcott reconstruction and model simulations.
This suggests that the climate models are right – Earth's surface temperature warmed rapidly at the end of the last ice age, from about 17,000 to 7,000 years ago, then the rate of warming slowed as the climate stabilized. However, it didn't reverse into a cooling trend, because atmospheric greenhouse gas levels were rising.
Then of course came the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, and carbon dioxide levels consequently shot up due to humans burning fossil fuels. As a result, temperatures have spiked as well. Over the past 130 years, global surface temperatures have risen about 20 times faster than when the Earth transitioned out of the last ice age. Over the past 40 years, the rate of global warming has been 3 times faster yet.
And that's in comparison to Earth's fastest natural climate change, when it's transitioning from an ice age to a warm period. Over the past 7,000 years, when human civilization was able to develop and thrive, Earth's temperatures and climate were quite stable. The temperature change during the past 7,000 years was about 0.5°C.
Humans have caused that much warming in just the past 25 years. If we follow through with the Paris agreement and manage to limit global warming to 2°C over a 200-year period, in that best-case scenario the Earth would still warm 20 times faster than a natural ice age transition. If we fail to cut carbon pollution, that rate could speed to more than 50 times faster than Earth's fastest natural climate change.
There are several important points we can take from the Baker study.
First, climate models are able to simulate climate changes over the history of human civilization fairly accurately.
Second, when there's a discrepancy between data and models, people have a tendency to distrust the models, but sometimes the problem lies more in the data.
Third, if not for the human influence, the climate would continue the stable conditions of the past 7,000 years, during which time human civilization developed and thrived.
Fourth and most importantly, humans are in the process of destabilizing the climate, and we're already causing global warming at a rate 20 times faster than Earth's fastest natural climate change. That's why climate scientists are so concerned, and why the Paris agreement is so important.

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Coal Is A Dinosaur And So Is The Growth Economy

Post Carbon Institute - Richard Heinberg


In a recent paper, Justin Ritchie, a Ph.D. candidate in resources and the environment at the University of British Columbia, and his co-author, UBC professor Hadi Dowlatabadi, pointed out that global estimates of the amounts of coal that are economically and technologically recoverable have fallen by two-thirds since the 1990s. This observation also formed the substance of my 2009 book, Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, so it’s nice to see the point taken up by others. However, Ritchie and Dowlatabadi go a step further and think through the implications of the ongoing coal reserves downgrades for climate modeling.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has for years produced computer-generated models of several possible trajectories for future greenhouse gas emissions through the remainder of the century. These “representative concentration pathways,” or RCPs, include an extreme high emissions case, RCP 8.5, that is commonly referred to as “business as usual.” In this scenario, “coal use in particular increases almost 10 fold by 2100” according to IPCC authors.


At the 2015 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, at a session co-organized by Post Carbon Institute and other organizations, PCI Fellow David Hughes gave a presentation in which he showed that actual recoverable fossil fuel reserves are consistent only with low-emissions RCP scenarios. The new paper from Ritchie and Dowlatabadi reaffirms much of Hughes’s argument (though Hughes looked more broadly at reserves of all fossil fuels, plus uranium).
What does this downgrading of likely carbon emissions mean for climate change modelers, climate activists, policy makers, and concerned citizens? According to Ritchie, the implication is clearly not as simple as “don’t worry, fossil fuel depletion will solve climate change for us.” Instead, “The same finding that shrinks CO2 emissions may also lower the cost of dealing with global warming, making the Paris Agreement that addresses climate change easier to achieve,” as a Bloomberg article on Ritchie’s paper puts it. That’s because costs of climate action are typically measured against the economic growth presumed to occur if the world continues burning coal and other fossil fuels at ever-increasing rates extrapolated from recent decades. If those extrapolations are unrealistic (too high), then keeping emissions within a two-degree Celsius limit will be easier and cheaper.
Ironically, Ritchie’s and Hughes’s questioning of likely future carbon emissions (no official change has filtered through the IPCC apparatus as of yet) occurs just as Donald Trump undertakes telegenic coal advocacy and abandons the Paris climate accord. In view of the reality that America’s best coal has already been dug and burned, the notion that the industry can somehow be revived at our president’s whim would be laughable—except that the sad joke is on the hundreds of thousands of coal country voters who fell for Trump’s fake promises.
Why has the world dragged its feet in adopting more realistic fossil fuel resource estimates? Pushback from the fossil fuel industry is certainly understandable: coal, oil, and gas companies—whether traded on stock markets or government owned—derive market value from their assets, which consist of future production potentials. Lower reserves estimates translate to lower asset valuations. The motives of climate scientists and activists in overestimating burnable carbon reserves are harder to divine; one can only guess that they accept at face value the numbers from the fossil fuel industries, and then pad those numbers further out of caution (more on this in a moment). In any case, more realistic fossil fuel reserves estimates should help us come to terms with reality in several ways—not only with regard to climate modeling, but economic expectations and political prospects as well.
Every few years, the IPCC issues a major new “assessment” crammed with data and models, aimed at informing policy makers. Unfortunately, these assessments are also filled with what Oliver Gedens has called “magical thinking.” For example, the most recent IPCC assessment (its fifth, released in 2014) described a series of computer-generated models of energy and emissions pathways that would keep the world below two degrees C. Eighty percent of these rely on negative emissions technologies, of which the primary one is Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS). The idea with BECCS is to grow enormous amounts of biomass, burn it, then capture the carbon and bury it. In order to capture and bury enough carbon to make enough of a difference, lots of biomass would be needed; by Gedens’s calculations an area larger than the size of India would have to be planted in fast-growing crops destined to be combusted. The carbon dioxide that’s captured would have to be compressed and moved through thousands of miles of pipelines to old, depleted oil and gas wells to be buried forever, requiring an infrastructure comparable to that of the current global oil industry. The costs would be enormous, as would be the risks.
Again, unrealistic assumptions about fossil fuel reserves, and therefore emissions, lead to unrealistic (i.e., implausibly expensive and risky) methods for keeping those emissions down. The only realistic solution to our climate crisis is not to put so much carbon in the atmosphere in the first place. But that path runs counter to expectations about economic growth—which requires energy. And that is almost surely at the root of the IPCC’s assumptions about future fossil fuel consumption (regardless of whether those fossil fuels are actually available to be consumed).
So far humanity has increased the global atmospheric CO2 concentration from 280 parts per million to over 400 ppm—an already dangerous level. David Hughes figures burning our remaining realistic reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas would send us to about 550 ppm. There’s an easy way of not getting to 550 ppm: leave most of those fossil fuel reserves in the ground. But that would sink the economy, unless we very rapidly develop alternative energy sources (nuclear, which is expensive and risky; or solar and wind, which are more realistic alternatives). Is it even possible to make the energy switch so quickly and completely as to avoid major bumps along the road? Building alternative energy infrastructure will itself require energy, and during the crucial early stages of the transition most of that energy will have to come from fossil fuels. There’s no way to bootstrap the energy transition process with energy from, say solar panels and wind turbines, because wind, and especially solar, technologies take years to energetically pay for their own manufacture and installation. So to avert burning even more fossil fuels than we otherwise would (in order to build all those solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, heat pumps, and so on), resulting in a big pulse of carbon emissions, we would have to severely curtail the use of fossil fuels for current purposes—the maintenance of business as usual. That would also imperil economic growth. And we are talking about a remarkably small time window available for the shift, compared with the decades required for past energy transitions. It’s all so complicated that one can get a headache just thinking about it.


The main stumbling block that leads policy makers to twist their logic into pretzels is economic growth. Remove the requirement for growth, and it’s barely possible (not easy, but possible) to reconcile carbon reserves, emissions, energy sources, and warming targets—if governments somehow dedicate enough money and policy effort to the job. However, with further economic growth as an absolute requirement, the resulting climate models fester with internal contradictions and with assumptions about speculative technologies that very few people believe can be scaled up sufficiently, and that may have economic, environmental, and political repercussions that no one is prepared to deal with.
We cannot afford to hide the implications of realistic fossil fuels reserves estimates behind magical thinking. Perhaps the most important of those implications is that the world is probably just about at peak energy right now, give or take a decade. If we act immediately and strongly to rein in climate change, then a peak in world energy usage will likely occur more or less immediately. If we don’t act, then we may have another decade before fossil fuel depletion results in peak energy anyway. Our energy mix will shift: in the case of strong climate policy, oil will start to decline first (due to depletion), probably before 2020, and coal as well (due to policy), with natural gas growing until roughly 2020-2050, when it peaks globally from depletion. Without strong climate policy, coal peaks anyway (due to depletion) around 2025 (Chinese coal consumption appears to have peaked in 2013-2014). The amount of energy we get from nuclear power probably won’t change much over this time period. Renewables will contribute a larger share, depending on investment levels and policy supports, but cannot realistically expand far enough, fast enough, to maintain energy growth and therefore economic growth.
So overall, one way or the other, we have just about hit the maximum burn rate our civilization is likely to achieve, and it’s mostly downhill from here. That has implications for robust economic growth (it’s essentially over), and hence for war and peace, inequality, political stability, and further population expansion. Dealing with the end of energy growth, and therefore economic growth, is the biggest political and social challenge of our time—though it’s unlikely to be recognized as such. (Our biggest ecological challenges consist of climate change, species extinctions, and ocean acidification.) The impacts of the end of growth will likely be masked by financial crashes and socio-political stresses that will rivet everyone’s attention while a quiet trend churns away in the background, undoing all our assumptions and expectations about the world we humans have constructed over the past couple of centuries.
If we’re smart, we will recognize that deeper trend and adapt to it in ways that preserve the best of what we have accomplished, and make life as fulfilling as it can be for as many people as possible, even while the amount of energy available to us ratchets downward. We’ll act to rein in population growth and aim for a gradual overall population decline, so that per capita energy use does not have to decline as fast as total use. We’ll act to minimize ecological disruption by protecting habitat and species. We’ll make happiness, not consumption, the centerpiece of economic policy.
If we’re not so smart, we’ll join the dinosaurs.

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